Can Poe lie on ‘truth’ even SC justices can’t agree on?
In his Feb. 21 column (“Speeding up the Grace Poe cases”), former chief justice Artemio Panganiban wrote about how fast the Supreme Court resolved the citizenship issue raised against the late Fernando Poe Jr., a presidential candidate in the 2004 elections: “In less than a month, the Court… speedily decided for FPJ!” He quoted from the decision: “[W]hile the totality of the evidence may not establish conclusively that respondent FPJ is a natural-born citizen… he cannot be held aguilty of having made a material misrepresentation in his [certificate of candidacy]… which, as so ruled in Romualdez-Marcos vs. Comelec, must not only be material but also deliberate and willful.”
That is exactly what many nonlawyer-commentators have also been saying all this time! It’s common sense! While the “totality of the evidence” may not also establish conclusively that presidential candidate Grace Poe is a natural-born citizen, she cannot by any stretch of the imagination be guilty of having “deliberately and willfully lied” about her citizenship status. What better proof is there than the fact that even the “brilliant” justices of the Supreme Court itself are hopelessly divided as to what kind of citizenship she really has? And look at the Commission on Elections itself: Its own chair no less is locking horns with the other commissioners on the issue! And they are all lawyers?!
So, if the only issue before the Supreme Court now is just whether Poe willfully lied or not about being a natural-born citizen thereby warranting the cancellation of her certificate of candidacy for president, the answer should be too obvious to require “oral arguments” that serve no better purpose than prolong the nation’s agony! Given the precedents (and seriously, just plain common sense), that issue should have been put to rest in just one sitting or so!
Ah, lawyers… the first thing we do is to kill all of them, to paraphrase a Shakespeare character in “Henry VI.”
—YVETTE SL. PETROCELLI, [email protected]
